Sunde on the trials and tribulations of the Pirate bay

The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde was beamed into a conference room by Skype at South by South West Interactive (SXSWi) today to talk to interviewer Elizabeth Stark about the Pirate Bay, his views on copyright and whether the Pirate Bay can ever be fully shut down.

While Sunde was often non-specific about the issues when pressed, he did drop some gems into the interview. Here are 15 of the most memorable quotes from his interview.

On why he didn't personally attend SXSWi:

"If I come to the US I will get so sued that I won't get out of the US for quite a while."

On the threatening letters received from lawyers:

"You get letters from the lawyers and usually they are very used to the people who receive them just doing what they are told. Lawyers aren't always right, but people are scared of them so we decided not to be scared. Instead we decided to reply in the same manner as their letters - if they sent threatening letters we sent threatening letters back.

"Some of the letters contained information on things to shove into holes in bodies, but the most important thing is that we told them that Sweden is not a part of the US – not yet. We sent a map of the world showing where the US was and where Europe was.

"And we sent pictures of polar bears – we said you think you have problems with US copyright law – we have problems with polar bears eating people in Sweden. They didn't know how to respond to that so they stopped sending letters."

On why he's not currently in jail:

"This is Sweden not the US – you are not going get pound-in-the-ass prison sentences here. You're not going to jail until all the appeals have been dealt with. We always thought that we might lose in the first round but in the second round we are going to win.

"We are not going to end up in jail – if we did, in Sweden one year equals nine months in jail and you get education and food for free. There's no free Wi-Fi. But I'm not going to jail."

On the $3 million in damages the Pirate Bay has been ordered to pay:

"Nobody is going to pay anything – there is no money to pay. Nobody is interested in just giving money away to big corporations that are just greedy and stupid."

On whether the Pirate Bay can be shut down:

"No – it's like HAL – it has its own life. It's probably impossible. You'd have to take down the domain or something and then someone will hack ICANN and give us our own top-level domain. Perhaps .peter [as opposed to .piratebay or .brokep]. Or maybe I'll just own the dot – that will be mine."

On whether everyone should have the right to share everything they want:

"Of course people have to have a system in place to be able to share and every country will have to do what they want surrounding that, as long as they don't infringe on freedom of speech and access to knowledge. Which kind of sets the barrier quite high. This idea has been discussed for hundreds of years.

"Not everything people do is good – people make Coca Cola and some people want it and some people don't, but we don't outlaw it."

So is the Pirate Bay like Coca-Cola?

"No, the Pirate Bay is more like sugar – it's bad for you but you can't stop using it. Bad because you get sued for it"